if you look under irony in the dictionary you'll probably find the yale guys from etcon04 - handing out free blank cds in the lobby to promote file sharing. but what does he do for a living? works for universal developing drm. take note - this is irony.

i wish trillian knew how to merge the logs for a meta contact. say, for instance, i was talking to some hot chick on icq about the finer points of xml-rpc. now icq goes down so i switch over to talking to them on aim. trillian lets me group contacts into "meta contacts", so hot chick is a meta contact with her icq, aim, msn, yahoo and jabber profiles (or possibly more than one of each) bundled into one. the only problem is that now when i go back to look up that conversation in my logs, it's split across the two log files. urgh. fix this please.

some much to digest from conconuk, but the big highlight was just seeing people i hadn't seen for a while. all of them. in a very small pub. and of course she was there. i was expecting that. i was prepared. only she had to go and be really plesant. spoke to her for ages about everything. she's now coming to lunch on friday. i can't help myself. i. am. hopeless.

after a visit for the dentist for some routine extorsion, i'm in an undescribeable amount of pain. so bad i can't concentrate on anything. constructing this sentance is a real challenge. what have i done to deserve this?

i take back at least some of what i've said about the uk music charts - my favourite track from the latest belle and sebastian album is in the top twenty. nice to hear radio one playing something half decent.

codeville sounds interesting (and will be demoed at codecon if you want to know more). the only trick they seem to have missed is making a cvs compatibility layer - i'd love to just drop the server inplace of cvs and give it a whirl, but learning a new client syntax (and thus building new client side tools) is too much effort for a non-proven system.

"it must be a lot easier to create a subaquatic survival suit for a bird than it would be to create a practical flying suit for a dolphin, especially as dolphins have low-mounted wings, a design which would make dolphins unstable in the air."

on the advice of a indie kid friend, i bought a pair of kristin hersh albums (sky motel and the grotto). in a word: stunning. the grotto, especially, i touching and sad, but with some excellent euphoric moments (listen to "Silver Sun"). definately my favourite album of the moment.

this color matcher thing is very nicely done. reminds me of some of the prototype stuff i was working on for a site several years ago which got abandonned for various reasons. after getting a call from a potential client today, i might get back into some dhtml stuff. such fun.

went to see lowgold at lunchtime. they played a small set (four tracks) from their newish album "welcome to winners". in a small club under little portland street, it was for radio execs as far as i could make out (i built their website and their management invited us along). very good stuff. i recommend you buy their cd.

ntk pointed to the adobe reader speedup lets you remove all the dumb plugins from acrobat reader to make it load alot quicker. very useful if you seem to spend all your life waiting for the damn thing to open.

book crossing is a really nice idea and seems to be getting reasonable returns (20-25% of books are caught after being released according to their faq). if i had time i'd love to take part. maybe there's some way you could tie this into social networking?

urgh - fucking tube. ninety minutes to cross half of zone one is just stupid (it's what, 3 miles?). if i couldn't be smug with the fact that i only have six more commuting days left in this country (and at least one of them offpeak due to conconuk) then i'd be really pissed off. talking to a fellow communiting sysadmin while we wait for a train, i wonder how i manage to stand this. i guess you just get used to it and your frame of reference is blurred. now, with a new frame rapidly approaching, i can be a little more objective about current events. urgh. get me out of here.

"The BBC is about to enter a period of scrutiny, examining it's mission and output in order to review whether it should keep that guaranteed income. So my proposal is for them to radically reassess their mission - working from the money back, and The Earth outward.

"The BBC should devote all their resources to conquering Space.

"The chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies should nominate Dr. Colin Pillinger as the next director-general, and announce that from the end of 2004 there will be no more TV, no more radio, no more internet services. All of the licence fee income will be ploughed into space exploration.

"2.5billion pounds a year is 4.55billion dollars at today's exchange rates. In one year, the newly rebranded BSC: British Space Command, will have outstripped Bush's recently-announced 5 year NASA budget increase."

chips for lunch: if food stuffs were humans, chips would be your reasonably attractive friends who are great fun to be with. but who bitch about you behind your back and ultimately lead to your (social / health) demise.

textures you don't expect: a semi-frozen can of (diet, urgh) coke which expands rapidly when opened - not an explosion but just a gradual expansion as it flows from the top of the can all over your desk. drinks which have the consistency of jelly. wet, shiney floors which aren't slippy.

office stories: someone in my office has just gone on a five minute rant about sainsburys selling him a fillet of snapper without descaling it. apparently he didn't realise they hadn't ("they always do, don't they?") cooked it and subsequently covered the entire meal in scales (cue wife: "what the fuck is this? i'm not eating it"). cooking seems way too difficult - i definately need a geek girlfriend who's in to cooking (or alternatively, just eat in resturants the whole time).

i'm about a month behind reading the perl6internals lists, but the dbdi announcement from tim bunce is interesting. this would almost force php and ruby to get good dbi layers in core. i, for one, can't wait.

the (poignant) guide to ruby is just great: "A range is two values surrounded by parentheses and separated by an ellipsis (in the form of two or three dots). Think of it as an accordion which has been squeezed down for carrying. (Sure, you can build a great sense of self-worth by carrying around an unfolded accordion, but sometimes a person needs to wallow in self-doubt, carefully concealing the squeeze-box.) The parentheses are the handles on the sides of a smaller, handheld accordion. The dots are the chain, keeping the folds tightly closed. Normally, only two dots are used. If a third dot is used, the last value in the range is excluded. When you see that third dot, imagine opening the accordion slightly. Just enough to let one note from its chamber. The note is that end value. We’ll let the sky eat it."

apparently mocha ssh client runs fine on the p900 (i hadn't tried it yet). i'm reticent to install it, as at least i have some small periods of time (while travelling) when i can't do any kind of server maintainance (not true of course - i can always dialup via bluetooth). getting the balance right between accessability and responsibility is tricky.

spotted on the company intranet by a colleague: "Please remember that all Internet sites visited from an **** network or that you visit from your workstation can now be easily captured for reporting. Thus making it easier to monitor and manage Internet traffic and usage. If in doubt, see the guidelines on Internet usage in the **** staff handbook or use this link". nice.

ConConUK is something not to be missed. given that i'm bunking off work on friday to go and see lowgold, then taking monday morning off to go to the dentist, i'm not sure how i justify taking monday afternoon off with only a few days left until i leave. hmm, some pleading might be in order.

after using it a little on osx, i'd love a windows port of sub etha edit. the developers say that this is very unlikely - it relies heavily on cocoa and can't really be "ported". there must be some equivilent windows app out there already? like ms word's "track changes", only in real time. maybe ms word will get add it in pretty soon.

this stuff looks beautiful and innovative (collaborative drawing tools that don't suck!). unfortunately it doesn't work through the firewall of doom (tm) so i'll have to check it out later. all built by Jared Tarbell from levitated.net and open source.

london agency wilson fletcher showing that you can use css for layout without lookinb like you're using css for layout (if that makes sense). unfortunately suffering from the "Flash of Unstyled Content" bug which makes for ugly loading. Blue robot suggests a couple of fixes.

ludicorp's transcendant interactions presentation gives much food for thought. do any of us really use applications for interactions (between people, at least) that don't transcend? applications that lock us into their own little microcosom which we don't aspire to find a way to componentise into our bigger picture interactions? i can't think of any this morning. maybe it's less about application shift and more about a new way of looking at interaction design. applications as non-discrete elements of "bigger picture" interaction.

the image on the bottom of this page is big. not just big, but huge. a full 1024x768 screen. when i first put it on there i thought it was a great idea. now trying it over dialup, i think it's an even better idea. gives a sense of intrigue, not knowing what's coming. it requires a certain patience in direct opposition to my usual feelings about speed of action. it's kinda soothing.

my initial atom thoughts: too many required attributes. entries wont necessarily have titles (these don't). annoying date format - it might be a standard, but it doesn't mean i have to like it. really just like rss with the tag names changed. again.

£280 seems way to much for just a laptop battery, but might just be worth it for 11 hours of battery life. It weighs a third of the laptop's weight too - i wonder how far it sticks out the back. when i'm running the country, batteries will be cheaper. and smaller.

i think i might be missing the point of the CSS zen garden - sure, you can create some purty design from css, but you still can't fucking do any kind of useful layout. like a couple of columns which size liquidly and don't jump under each other. and, you know, work on all the browsers that people are using. long live tables. or, of course, someone could add some layout stuff to css that doesn't suck quite so badly.

you know what's really annoying? css. you know what's even more annoying? css in ie. luckily for us there are a whole bunch of designers out there having a css hack wank fest and finding work arounds for everyone else. yay for them.

cal's back today and I haven't posted anything in the weblog yet, so I'd better do it quick.
I like Lodger, my favourite song out of the bunch being "Fickle" which you can listen to in the Audio section. The videos are definately worth a look too (though perhaps not for minors, even if they are stick men).

Did anyone see Harry on Faking It the other night? I think she's fantastic. Have a look at her videos for "So Real" and her cover of "Imagination".

Just in case you haven't noticed them around, Franz Ferdinand are quite cool and I can't stop playing their "Take Me Out" single. I'm sure it was in the charts a few weeks ago at No 2 or something.